Teetering
by miss selah
Summary: [Grim Adventures] Sometimes Death really is the end. Sometimes you don’t want it to be. Sometimes it doesn’t matter. [Mandy x Grim] [Slightly horrific] [Vague underage]


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**TEETERING**

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She isn't ten when he meets her the first time, and a hamster hasn't died. She is two and toddling on the edge of the rug, threatening to walk to the corpse of her dead babysitter. The blood that stained the ground stained her feet and she tracked it all the way across the house as she followed him, her first steps marked by the passing of a life.

He looks at her and smiles, in a skeleton kind of way of smiling, and lifts her in to her arms for a moment. The wretched child – obviously cursed – giggles and traces stunted digits over the smooth planes of his skull and Grim gives her a tiny kiss on her pretty, perpetual scowl. Mandy – though he doesn't yet know that is her name – cooed at him in half annoyance before struggling to be set back on the ground. She looks at her baby sitter's corpse, growing colder and stiffer by the moment as rigomortis sets in, and then she looks at him. He can see death reflected in her eyes; can see a version of himself that he didn't knew existed. Death is something new to the morbid child; something exciting and fascinating that she can't wait to learn how to use to her advantage.

A wolf howls outside the window panes, odd considering that they live so near the city. He stays with her for the next two hours, wondering what sort of child giggles as she splashed in a pool of blood but not when powerpuff girls come on. He stays with her until he hears the car, and even then he watches until the paramedics come and her mother can give her more attention.

She isn't ten the second time he meets her, and that annoying twit of a boy isn't her sole companion yet. She is six – maybe – and licking on a lollipop, her tongue darting in and out to catch the sweet flavoring. She has just chased Mindy away, and she is sitting on a wall of bricks. He wonders for a moment where he has seen her before but decides to not question it. He does his job as well as he always has, removing the soul and letting the body die, and he realizes that she is _staring _at him, even though no one should be able to see. She is staring at him, staring _through _him, her scowl lightened as a box falls on the mover and her drowns in the blood that has cupped in the back of his throat. He can't have swallowed it because the box that fell snapped his neck and pinned him there, nearly severing it off entirely.

Grim recognizes her when a tiny slippered foot kicks back and forth, and the shoe falls off. Pale skin, pale, but he can still remember her first blood-stained steps. Can still remember that this child had seen death and nearly smiled, but didn't, and had ran fingers over his face.

It was the third time that he meets her that there had been a limbo, and the next nearly indistinguishable from the rest.

He wonders if it had always been the blonde little girl-child's plan, to tie him to her for eternity, or if perhaps it was his. If perhaps that rodent hadn't hurt him (after all, he had no nerve endings) and if perhaps he wanted it just as badly as she did. She is fifteen and on the verge of something great, and Billy has moved on to other things with Irwin – things that don't include girls. It is his gain, though, as Mandy's pretty pink dress skims up his leg and wraps about his skeletal hip bone. He has no flesh, no meat, but a finger does nicely and she moans when he is in. He has no tongue to taste her, no senses to touch her, but she drives him out of his mind as she teeters on the edge of insanity.

Her first time, like her first steps, is soaked in blood and followed by only a softening of her scowl.

The second time is right after the first, because he isn't done yet, he hasn't heard her _scream, _and the third time she cries but tries to hide it. The fourth time he tries to comfort her, and by the fifth time she doesn't bother to hide it.

She is eighteen now, walking down the aisle and then looking for new houses. He isn't sure how long forever and ever is going to last, but he is beginning to worry that it won't be long enough. He begins to take money from whatever poor soul he reaps, because it's not like they need it anymore, and Mandy is having such a hard time paying rent that she can't think about food, and she is nearly as skinny as he is. He does his best to keep her happy, and she doesn't bark as many orders as she did when she was younger. He thinks it's all going to be okay, that they can go through her lifetime in this easy state, until she is twenty four.

She always said that she never wanted any children, which was why he was so perfect for her, but she also insisted that she was going to rule the world. Out of the two, he would have assumed that she would have ruled the world before having children. Still, they are in the mall and walking past a play pen when a blonde child that has nearly her eyes, only brighter, smiles up at her, and laughs when Mandy only scowls.

Grim doesn't know what Mandy wants anymore, but he will do his damndest to give it to her.

By thirty, she's given up hope.

The accident happens when she's thirty one.

He stays by her bed while she is comatose and waits until finally someone comes and demands that he quits his post as the Grim Reaper since he never reaps.

Grim starts, of course, with him.

It doesn't bring Mandy back to consciousness, and it doesn't fill that empty space where a heart should be but isn't. It doesn't fill that place that Mandy did, even when she did become more gently, even if she still never smiles.

She is thirty three when she wakes up for a minute, and it gives the doctors hope. But Grim knows better – Grim knows that she should have died that day, three years ago, and that he was just postponing it. Maybe it would be best if someone else were to do it. . . but something primal and possessive rears it's ugly head and would never dream of letting some successor take Mandy's – his precious, cruel Mandy – soul away from her.

When she is thirty four and almost always awake, she asks him to kill her.

He isn't going to. He is going to make sure that she holds on to life the way he's held on to her, and by God, he will see to it that she never dies. She will grow old and crippled and weak, but she will keep on breathing, forever, because that was the terms that she had set herself.

He isn't going to take her soul.

But then she says Please.

Cradled in the sun-bleached bones of his arms, Grim tries to cry but can't, because tears are for the living, just like love is for ones with hearts, and commitment is for people who don't have eternity to promise.

He picks up his scythe and begins to reap once again, and when he comes across a toddler who takes her first step through blood, he doesn't think twice about killing her.

He's not going through that again, because forever and ever isn't as long as he had hoped.

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End file.
